Charles Kaiser on new New York Times columnist William Kristol

"You can't blame the people who run the Times for thinking the paper belongs to them. But those of us who have grown up with it secretly believe it's ours. The Times is in the same position as the Jews: It's expected to behave better than everybody else."
—Robert Gottlieb

The former Knopf and New Yorker editor said that to me way back in 1982, but Gottlieb's observation remains just as accurate today. Last week, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. managed to enrage practically everyone who still holds the Times to that higher standard by anointing Bill Kristol as the paper's newest op-ed columnist.

Many Times readers consider Kristol a third-rate neocon apparatchik, a stark symbol of the steep decline of the Washington culture—and arguably the most consistently mean-spirited and wrong-headed pundit of our time (examples below).

Hence the outrage of that diminishing number of people who still think of the Times as the indispensable engine of American journalism. "Lunacy institutionalized" was one of the milder reactions FCP received on the day of the announcement.

Outrage was followed by bafflement after editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal described Kristol as "a captivating writer and keen observer of the political landscape."

Rosenthal added, "The idea that the New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual—and somehow that's a bad thing. How intolerant is that?" Well, it is true that Kristol is a conservative.

Kristols and Rosenthals go back a long way together. Bill's father, Irving, and Andy's father, Abe—both charter neocons—were good friends, and Irving Kristol was a proud member of the "Rosenthal for President" lunch club, which also included Bill Buckley, Dick Clurman, Bernard Kalb (known as Bruno Frescobaldi) and Arthur Gelb. And when Andy Rosenthal covered the Bush I White House with Maureen Dowd, Bill Kristol—then vice president Dan Quayle's chief of staff—was a source for both Times reporters.

An e-mail I received from comedy writer Jon Schwartz offered the best explanation for the nearly universal befuddlement over Bill Kristol's appointment:

Like you, I've spent a fair amount of time around the people who run America. And things like this from Rosenthal make me feel they've really gone bonkers. (It could also be that they've always been nuts and I'm only noticing it now, but I get the feeling they've gotten significantly worse.)

Rosenthal either (1) has no understanding of what the criticism re Kristol actually is, or (2) does understand but feels it's his job to lie about it. Moreover, Rosenthal genuinely not understanding the criticism is arguably worse than him lying, since it would demonstrate he's completely detached from reality.

Obviously anyone angry about this knows that in Rosenthal's circles, Kristol is "respected" and considered "serious" and "intellectual." That's why they're angry.

It's as though an NFL coach decided to start a four-foot, 65-pound Korean eight-year-old at middle linebacker, and when he got criticized, responded: "People are mad we're using a player of such tremendous size and experience, just because he's Korean. How intolerant!"Here is Schwartz's essential point: "It's as though an NFL coach decided to start a four-foot, 65-pound Korean eight-year-old at middle linebacker, and when he got criticized, responded: 'People are mad we're using a player of such tremendous size and experience, just because he's Korean. How intolerant!'" Which could be why Time dispensed with Kristol's contributions last month after he had penned one feeble column after another for the newsweekly.

In the same spirit as Schwartz, UC-Berkeley economics professor Brad Delong wrote, "Many people would be interested in reading a newspaper that publishes the writings of a serious, respected conservative intellectual. But how many people ought to read a newspaper that regards its mission as giving platforms to lying propagandists? The clueless Mr. Rosenthal and his equally clueless bosses have a problem: They cannot tell one from another. And this makes one wonder why anybody thinks they have any business running a newspaper."

What makes this all the more mysterious—and depressing—is the fact that Rosenthal continues to produce one of the most intelligent and fiercely antiwar editorial pages in America.

But just like Newsweek's hiring of Karl Rove, the Times's decision was really just the latest instance of Spiro Agnew's revenge. (As I explained here a few weeks ago, it was Agnew who inspired this misguided impulse by liberal outlets to employ the enemy, after Nixon's vice president launched the right-wing's permanent war on the "liberal media" more than 30 years ago.)

I asked Sulzberger why this was the perfect moment to hire Kristol, the most unrepentant spokesman for the neoconservatives—surely the most discredited group in America, after the Bush Administration has managed to fuck up just about everything by following their advice.

The Times publisher replied with the usual bromides about "balance": "We still have Krugman and Rich; Herbert and Collins; Dowd ... And now we have a new weekly columnist who expresses a very different point of view in a full-throated way. Given that we're a paper that believes in vibrant political discourse, that's a good thing." He also urged me to go back and read the initial reaction to his father's hiring of the "once vilified and now sainted William Safire."

Despite his relatively reliable defense of civil liberties, I was never won over by Safire, partly because he always remained an unflagging flack for Richard Nixon, the second most corrupt president after the current occupant of the White House. But the idea that Kristol might ever rise even to Safire's level of competence is, frankly, a sick joke.

Inside the Times, there was equal outrage over the paper's willingness to jettison all of its own rules to recruit this third-rate pontificater. Unlike all of his op-ed colleagues, Kristol is allowed to continue in both of his former jobs, as editor of the Rupert Murdoch–owned Weekly Standard and as a regular on Murdoch's Fox News network.

"At least Safire had to quit the White House before the Times hired him," one Timesman remarked. He added, "Exactly why would you want to recruit someone whose boss [Murdoch] has vowed to destroy you?" That is what Murdoch has said he intends to do with his latest acquisition, the Wall Street Journal.

Andy Rosenthal told me, "Comparing the Weekly Standard to the White House is waaaay off." To which I replied, "That's true, in a sense: Rupert is much more serious about destroying the Times than Nixon was."

The worst part is that the hiring of Kristol occurred just as the memory of the Judy Miller debacle was beginning to fade. Miller was the reporter whom Sulzberger mistakenly decided to champion after she had written a series of highly dubious stories that hastened our headlong dash into the war in Iraq. To his credit, Sulzberger eventually reversed himself, and Miller was jettisoned. But now he has rewarded war's single most mindless and most enthusiastic champion with a prized berth on the op-ed page. And that blunder has rekindled all of the righteous anger over the paper's disastrous role in America's decision to embark on this catastrophe.

A Kristol Sampler

Once upon a time, prescience was a prerequisite for a pundit's success. No more. Below are some of Bill Kristol's greatest hits, quoted by Anonymous Liberal and Glenn Greenwald.

March 17, 2003, on the eve of our invasion of Iraq:

We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.

August 26, 2002:

Reading the Scowcroft/New York Times "arguments" against war, one is struck by how laughably weak they are. European international-law wishfulness and full-blown Pat Buchanan isolationism are the two intellectually honest alternatives to the Bush Doctrine. Scowcroft and the Times wish to embrace neither, so they pretend instead to be terribly "concerned" with the administration's alleged failure to "make the case."

April 4, 2003:

There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular.

April 28, 2003:

The United States committed itself to defeating terror around the world. We committed ourselves to reshaping the Middle East, so the region would no longer be a hotbed of terrorism, extremism, anti-Americanism, and weapons of mass destruction. The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably. But these are only two battles. We are only at the end of the beginning in the war on terror and terrorist states.

March 22, 2004:

[T]here are hopeful signs that Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic, and political persuasions can work together. This is a far cry from the predictions made before the war by many, both here and in Europe, that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath. The perpetually sour American media focus on the tensions between Shiites and Kurds that delayed the signing by three whole days. But the difficult negotiations leading up to the signing, and the continuing debates over the terms of a final constitution, have in fact demonstrated something remarkable in Iraq: a willingness on the part of the diverse ethnic and religious groups to disagree—peacefully—and then to compromise. This willingness is the product of what appears to be a broad Iraqi consensus favoring the idea of pluralism.

July 26, 2004:

What the Bush administration did say—and what so many reporters seem to have trouble understanding—is that Iraq and al Qaeda had a relationship that, by its very existence, posed a potential threat to the United States.

For an even more detailed description of all of Kristol's misguided statements about Iraq in the Weekly Standard, see my brother David Kaiser's splendid blog.

Research assistance: Thomas Rogers, Richard Vanderford


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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.